From time to time I encounter openly discoverable code that is so wild in nature that I can’t help but wonder if the author was writing a machine function or a satirical statement.
Groovy source: ArrayUtil.java
After spending a few days plowing through Java code at the outset of a new Android project I found myself checking around for practical alternatives. In the course of that search (which netted Scala, Groovy and Clojure, in descending order of easy tooling for Android) I stumbled across this gem of a source file in the Groovy codebase. At first I couldn’t really tell if this was a joke about Java’s expressiveness or a functioning bit of code, but then I realized it is actually both — all the more funny because its expressing a cumbersome optimization that will execute on the same JVM either way:
Breach: A browser as practical satire
Someone from the Erlang world was kind enough to paste a link to Breach — a browser written in node.js. Its so full of meta fail and manifests the very essence of hipster circular logic that… I can only assume it is satire in the same vein as INTERCAL.
IBM SDK for Node.js on System Z
The going question at IBM has, for the last few decades at least, not been “Is it a good idea?” but “Are people deluded enough to pay for this?” This stands in heavy contrast to the countless bouts of genius that have peppered their research and development over the last century.
But IBM is a business, after all, and we’ve all got to eat. IBM was late recognizing that the majority of programmers and other IT professionals had left the world of engineering behind for the greener pastures of pop culture and fansterish tech propaganda, and to play catch up IBM had to innovate. Actually, this is a sort of business genius: IBM realized that tech doesn’t sell as well as bullshit and buzz when it watched Motorola get steamrolled by Intel’s marketing efforts around the original 286.
Intel pitched a bad chip design to tech illiterate execs, deliberately avoiding customers’ engineering departments, and prevailed against Motorola’s vastly superior designs — brilliant, if you don’t mind being a charlatan. Fortunately, Intel has at least occasionally made up for it since then (having been the only ones serious about SSD reliability early on, for example).
IBM has gone one further. I think this must have started as a practical joke at IBM, and then someone realized “Wait! Holy shit! This could be the hipster coup of the century and get us back in the web game!” Har har har. Joke’s on… all of us.
IBM SDK for Node.js v1.1 on System Z
“Process scope variables” in Erlang
I couldn’t have written a more concise satire-by-demonstration on what sucks about bringing the Java-style OOP thinking process as mental/emotional baggage when one starts using Erlang than this short message that appeared on the Erlang-Questions mailing list one day:
> So much time spent for removing one State variable from a few function calls. much more time will be saved when refactoring from now on. imagine: most funs will now have signature: -spec a(pid()) -> ok. and most function bodies will look like: check(Pid), update(Pid), return(Pid). it will be a breeze now.
Like… whoa. That just happened. And it wasn’t sarcastic.
A gloriously sarcastic response can be found here.